Mining companies around the world are actively working to reduce emissions, but the path to decarbonization is complex and highly site-specific. These discussions will focus on practical approaches that are being tested and implemented today, including electrification, energy storage, renewable integration, and hybrid power solutions. Participants will share real experiences, lessons learned, and ongoing challenges related to cost, infrastructure, reliability, and scalability. The emphasis will be on knowledge sharing and informed dialogue to support realistic, achievable progress toward lower-carbon mining operations.

8:30 am
Welcome from the City of Greater Sudbury
Paul Lefebvre, Mayor, City of Greater Sudbury

8:35 – 9:00 am
Welcome, Safety Share
Andrew Scott, Interim CEO, Global Mining Guidelines Group

9:00 – 9:30 am
The Risk of Diesel Fleets
Emily Thorn Corthay, Founder & CEO, Thorn Associates
The blockage of the Strait of Hormuz caused diesel prices to sky rocket up 45% in only the first month of the Iran war. Traditionally, mining companies consider a diesel fleet to be the safe, conservative option compared to alternatives such as battery electric fleets, alternative fuels, in pit crushing and conveying, etc. The increasingly unstable geopolitics of the world, coupled with more frequent and more severe climate change-related disasters, mean that stable diesel prices and diesel delivery to mining sites are no longer guaranteed, especially over a long life of mine. This presentation will cover various risks to diesel mining fleets along with potential mitigation options including a case study.

9:30 – 10:00 am
MacLean GR8 EV Surface Grader: A Fit-for-Purpose Development Story
David Jacques, VP – Engineering, MacLean Engineering
After 50+ years developing mobile equipment for underground mining, including 10 years of battery electrification, MacLean has launched its Surface Mining Vehicle division and is developing its first product, the GR8 EV Surface Grader. This product is being developed jointly with Fortescue Zero’s power system to meet the requirements of Fortescue’s aggressive targets to fully decarbonise by 2030. In developing this new product, MacLean took on a comprehensive look at what it means to develop a fit for purpose battery electric grader. This presentation will share insights into the important discoveries made during the development phase and how the GR8 will set a new benchmark for this product class.

10:00 – 10:15 am
From Waste to Energy Infrastructure
Nick Nesbitt, Founder, Mapleview Energy
This session explores how circular approaches to energy and infrastructure can be applied in real-world settings, with a focus on battery repurposing and energy storage. Drawing on early stage project experience, it highlights how sustainability objectives can be translated into deployable systems, along with key considerations around integration, economics, and scaling. A case study will be used to ground the discussion and share practical insights and lessons learned.

10:45 – 10:55 am
STUDENT SPOTLIGHT
Key Parameters for Electric Haulage Feasibility in Open-Pit Mining
Batur Tokac, PhD Candidate, Robert M. Buchan Department of Mining, Queen’s University
Battery electric (BE) haulage offers a promising path toward low emission mining, but its reliability, scalability, and cost in open pit operations remain uncertain. This study develops an integrated framework combining physics based energy modelling, discrete event simulation, genetic algorithm optimization, sensitivity analysis, and machine learning to evaluate BE fleet performance. Results show that performance is driven by operational design rather than component sizing: larger batteries reduce rather than improve energy productivity (the material hauled per unit of energy consumed), road gradient is the dominant constraint, payload capacity offers the largest efficiency gains, and ambient temperature has negligible net effect. The framework offers a structured decision support tool for the diesel to BE transition.

10:55 – 11:15 am
An Approach to Energy Management at the Mine Site
Michelle Levesque, Engineering Technical Lead, Natural Resources Canada
Ron Bose, Principal Engineer and CEM, XPS-Glencore

11:15 – 12:15 pm
Energy Management in Practice: From Strategy to Site Integration
Interactive Working Session
Energy management remains a critical—but still fragmented—challenge across mining operations. This working session explores how energy considerations can be integrated across the full site, including interactions with utilities and surrounding communities. Participants will work through implementation challenges, share lessons learned, and examine how benchmarking and performance tracking can support more effective, coordinated energy strategies.

Artificial intelligence and advanced data analytics are increasingly part of the mining toolkit—but successful application depends on more than algorithms alone. These conversations will explore how AI is being applied in operational settings, where it is delivering value, and what conditions are needed for effective deployment. Industry, technology providers, and researchers will share insights on data readiness, system integration, workforce adoption, and governance. The focus will be on practical use cases and shared learning that can help organizations move from experimentation to sustained operational impact.

1:15 – 1:45 pm
From The Trenches: What separates AI deployments That Work from Those That Don’t
Sebastian Goodfellow, Senior Director of Product & AI, Kore Geosystems and Director, Lassonde Institute of Mining, University of Toronto
Most conversations about AI in mining focus on the technology. This one focuses on everything else. Drawing on direct experience building and deploying AI products for geological data capture at KORE Geosystems, Sebastian will walk through the practical realities of AI adoption in mining: what the technology actually does, where value is genuinely being created, and, critically, where deployments stall or fail. He will share KORE’s operational playbook for integration, covering data readiness, change management, governance, and the human factors that determine whether a system gets used or abandoned.
One factor that consistently separates successful deployments from failed ones is the organization’s own digital fluency, the degree to which its people understand what AI can and cannot do, and can engage meaningfully with the systems being introduced. Sebastian will close with a perspective from the Lassonde Institute of Mining at U of T on how the mining engineering curriculum is evolving to address this need and what it means for the talent pipeline entering the industry.

1:45 – 2:00 pm
From Black Hole to Closed Loop: What We Learned Deploying AI with Hourly Workers
Calvin Benchimol, Co-Founder & CEO, Crewscope
AI adoption in heavy industry is being driven from the boardroom down. But the people doing the work are asking a different question: will this data be used against me? That gap is where most AI field deployments quietly fail. Calvin Benchimol, CEO of Crewscope and former Lafarge operations leader, shares hard-won lessons from deploying AI workflows with EllisDon and Amrize’s Lafarge quarry operations. This is not a product pitch. It is an honest account of adoption friction at every organizational layer, from executives to hourly workers, what made pilots succeed or stall, and how AI is fundamentally changing the relationship between workers and the systems they use. Attendees will leave with a practical framework for evaluating AI tools for field deployment, including the governance and privacy questions most organizations aren’t asking before they buy.

2:00 – 2:30 pm
STUDENT SPOTLIGHT
Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for Intelligent Truck Dispatching in Open Pit Mines: A Comparative Study
Arman Hazrathosseini, PhD Candidate, The Robert M. Buchanan Department of Mining, Queen’s University
This study explores the use of reinforcement learning (RL) to improve truck dispatching in open-pit mining operations. Traditional dispatching methods often struggle to adapt to dynamic conditions, leading to inefficiencies in productivity, fuel use, and emissions. To address this, the research compares four RL algorithms DQN, DDQN, DuDQN, and PPO within a simulated mining environment. The results show that while all approaches improve performance, DQN achieves the strongest overall results, highlighting the potential of RL to enhance operational efficiency and support more sustainable mining practices.

From Aerial Imagery to Actionable Road Maintenance: AI-Based Monitoring of Mine Haul Roads
Loghman Moradi, PhD Candidate, University of Toronto
This presentation focuses on mining haul road monitoring and optimization using satellite and UAV imagery combined with AI-based techniques. The main goal is to use aerial and remote sensing data to automatically detect mining haul roads, extract their geometrical characteristics, and evaluate potential deficiencies or safety-related issues. This includes analyzing road features such as width, alignment, slope/grade, curvature, and other geometric conditions that may affect haulage efficiency and safety. The broader objective of this work is to develop an automated framework that can support mine-wide road inspection and maintenance planning. Based on the extracted information, the system can generate reports identifying road deficiencies, highlight priority areas for repair or monitoring, and support the creation of maintenance work orders based on the severity and urgency of the detected issues.

LiDAR-Powered Rock Fragmentation and Size Distribution Analysis for Smarter Underground Mining
Mojgan Faramarzi, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Toronto
Rock fragmentation analysis is critical for evaluating blast efficiency in underground mining, but traditional imaging methods used in open-pit operations are difficult to apply underground due to limited access and poor lighting conditions. This work introduces MaskMine3D, a transformer-based 3D instance segmentation framework designed to automatically delineate rock fragments from UAV-acquired LiDAR point clouds in underground stopes. Trained entirely on synthetic data using geometric features rather than RGB imagery, the model enables reliable fragmentation analysis regardless of lighting conditions. The system achieved strong performance on synthetic test scenes and was successfully deployed on real underground mine data, producing realistic fragmentation results validated by domain experts. The study demonstrates the potential of synthetic-to-real AI transfer for automated rock fragmentation analysis in inaccessible underground environments.

3:00 – 3:15 pm
Automated Severity Assessment of Mine Shaft Structural Components: A Machine Learning Pipeline Benchmarked Against Expert Inspection
Jordan Lanteigne, Sales and Business Development, Point Laz
Point Laz develops automated mine shaft inspection technology aimed at improving the consistency, safety, and throughput of structural condition assessments. This presentation describes a three-stage machine learning pipeline that classifies mine shaft structural components according to a SIMM-based severity framework. The pipeline integrates supervised structure detection, defect classification, and severity scoring, complemented by unsupervised anomaly detection to surface conditions that fall outside the labeled training distribution. A field case study is then presented in which the automated assessments are benchmarked against expert manual inspections, providing a quantitative view of inter-rater agreement, characteristic failure modes, and the operational readiness of the approach as a complement to, or eventual replacement for, conventional inspection practice.

3:15 – 3:30 pm
AI and Applications of Data + Data and Interoperability
Andrew Scott, Interim CEO, Global Mining Guidelines Group

3:45 – 4:45 pm
AI in Mining: From Hype to Operational Readiness
Interactive Working Session
AI capabilities are evolving rapidly, but adoption in mining is uneven. This session explores the current landscape—where AI is delivering value, where challenges remain, and what the industry needs to prepare for broader implementation. Building on insights from GMG’s AI work, participants will identify key priorities, capability gaps, and opportunities for industry alignment and education.

Introducing new technology into mining operations requires careful planning, collaboration, and adaptability. These discussions will examine real-world implementation experiences, highlighting both successes and challenges encountered when moving from pilot projects to full deployment. Speakers will address topics such as change management, safety considerations, integration with existing systems, and performance validation. By sharing honest experiences and lessons learned, participants will gain actionable insights to support more effective and informed technology adoption across the industry.

8:30 – 9:00 am
Opening, Safety Share and Reflections from Day 1
Andrew Scott, Interim CEO, Global Mining Guidelines Group

9:00 – 9:30 am
Nunavut Technology Road Map
Myles Grenon, Nunavut Project Lead, Agnico Eagle
Aligning three sites at different stages of the technology life cycle and guiding each from early to end states within an evolving technology landscape.

9:30 – 10:00 am
Electrifying the Underground: MacLean’s Battery Journey
Alexander Lenz, Product Manager – Electrification, MacLean Engineering
With the underground mining industry rapidly shifting toward battery-electric vehicles (BEVs), MacLeans electrification journey has focused on delivering practical, safe, and productive solutions for demanding mine conditions. This abstract traces the evolution of MacLean’s battery and charging systems—from early design choices and field learnings to today’s integrated powertrain, energy storage, and charging ecosystem—highlighting the engineering trade-offs that shaped performance, reliability, and serviceability underground. It outlines how battery chemistry selection, thermal management, enclosure design, and functional safety requirements informed successive generations of packs, while charging strategies (on-board vs. off-board, fast-charging capability, infrastructure compatibility, and interoperability) were refined to reduce downtime and simplify mine deployment. The presentation also summarizes key operational insights from customer trials and production fleets, including maintenance workflows, operator experience, and approaches to managing energy availability across mixed equipment lineups. Finally, it looks ahead to the next stage of MacLean’s BEV roadmap, emphasizing scalable architectures, higher-energy systems, and charging standards that support broader mine electrification goals.

10:30 – 10:50 am
Current GMG Technology Projects: Rethink mine design
Ron Bose, Principal Engineer and CEM, XPS-Glencore

10:50 – 12:00 pm
Designing for Change: Rethinking Mine Design for Technology Implementation
Interactive Working Session
As technology becomes more integrated into operations, mine design must evolve to support long-life assets in a rapidly changing environment. This session explores how design and operational planning can better anticipate ongoing technology change—moving beyond one-time implementation toward more adaptable, future-ready systems. Participants will share lessons learned and explore practical approaches to embedding flexibility into mine design.

1:00 – 1:30 pm
NOHFC Funding Options for Northern Ontario Stakeholders
Pierre Séguin, Northern Development Advisor, Ontario Ministry of Northern Economic Development and Growth
How the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation (NOHFC) programs provide financial support to a variety of stakeholders under its 4 main programs: Invest North, Workforce Development, Community Enhancement, and the Cultural Supports Programs.

1:30 – 2:00 pm
Current GMG Technology Projects: Zero Entry
Presenter to come

2:30 – 4:00 pm
Preparing for Zero-Entry Mining: Integration, Automation, and What Comes Next
Interactive Working Session
As automation advances, concepts like zero-entry mining and safe mixed fleets are moving closer to reality. This session explores what needs to be considered today—from system integration to operational models—to enable these future states. Discussions will focus on the increasing complexity of interconnected technologies and what it takes to implement them safely and effectively at scale.

The session will conclude with a fireside discussion with GMG Board members, connecting these insights to GMG’s ongoing work and future direction.